INGE, WILLIAM (1913-1973)

Born on May 3, 1913, in Independence, Kansas,
William Inge is best remembered for four theatrical
successes: Come Back, Little Sheba
(1950), the Pulitzer Prize winner Picnic (1953),
Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). Inge's portraits made him the first
successful playwright to re-create small-town
Plains life, including its hypocrisy and oppressive
judgments. His characters frequently find
that they must settle for life as it is and not as
they wish it to be.

Before his success with Come Back, Little Sheba, which was produced on Broadway in
1950, Inge had worked in a number of occupations,
none of which satisfied him. He labored
on a highway crew, as an English teacher in the
Columbus (Kansas) High School in 1937–38,
as an instructor at Stephens College in Columbia,
Missouri, from 1938 to 1943, and as a
drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times from
1943 to 1946. He once told an interviewer that
he felt out of place in Kansas and did not claim
it as his past until he moved to New York.

Even after his success with Come Back, Little Sheba and the three plays that followed, Inge
was plagued by self-doubts. In 1959 A Loss of Roses failed critically and financially, and Inge
retreated to Florida and began work on his
script Splendor in the Grass, for which he won
an Academy Award in 1961. Inge returned
to drama with Natural Affection (1963) and
Where's Daddy? (1966), but both were unsuccessful,
confirming his fears that he could not
live up to his four Broadway plays of the 1950s.
Inge then turned to fiction, hoping to avoid the
negative criticism that devastated him. He
published two novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
(1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971),
but again his work was largely rejected. His
earlier anxieties and depression, compounded
by chronic alcoholism, left him with an overwhelming
pessimism, and on June 10, 1973, in
Los Angeles, he killed himself. Inge felt that he
could no longer write, and without writing he
did not want to live. Although some of his
characters manage to settle for a qualified happiness,
Inge was unable to make a similar compromise.
He was buried in his hometown.